You’re planning on creating a website presence online. You buy some web hosting. So now what? Well, the next step is you should receive an email containing some very important information related to your hosting account—or at least an email with a link to where you can obtain this data. While there may be a lot of information concerning your web hosting account in your welcome email, there are five items that everyone should be aware of.
1. Nameservers
These are the computers where your site actually resides. Usually, they will look something like ns1.xxxxx.com and ns2.xxxxxx.com. If you get your domain with your hosting plan, your web hosting company will probably set these up for you. However, if you get your domain through a separate provider or want to move your site to another host in the future, you’ll need your nameserver information to connect your domain to your web servers. For example, to see how this is done at Go Daddy, take a look at my previous post here.
2. Control Panel URL and Login Information
Whether your web host uses cPanel or their own custom interface, you need this information to access all the features of your web hosting account. If you have not already setup your login and password information when signing up for your hosting, you should receive this information via email.
3. Incoming/Outgoing Mail Server
In order to receive and send out email, you’ll need this information to specify the incoming and outgoing mail servers to your email client. For example, with iPage your incoming server is something like pop.yourdomainname.com and the outgoing server is smtp.yourdomainname.com.
4. Webmail URL
If you want to access your email via the internet through a web browser, you’ll need the appropriate URL.
5. Website IP
Although you might not initially need your website IP address, it is very important to know the actual address of your site. This information will be particularly useful in your website statistics research and web analytics.
